Theophilus North

Let's hope Keen Company's production of Theophilus North doesn't fall by the wayside, brushed aside by the wind tunnel created by its faster, louder neighbors in the nascent fall season.

Matthew Burnett's play is based on Thornton Wilder's 1973 novel of the same name. (The book was turned into a movie in 1988, the impressively cast Mr. North.) By modern standards, Wilder's quaintly whimsical tale of the titular New Jersey teacher getting bogged down in Newport, Rhose Island, on his way to see the world isn't "edgy." But it's this very lack of anything resembling hipsterism that feels almost revolutionary at this point. Keen artistic director Carl Forsman and actor Giorgio Litt, in the title role, do a great job of suggesting that Theophilus' intrusions in the lives of his new neighbors often come burdened with an unspoken sense of superiority, but the character remains likeable because he always means well—and this is the kind of motivation you hardly ever seem to encounter in art these days. The creative team also never takes away from the sense of awakening to the world that permeates the work.

Theophilus North plays until October 14 at the Clurman on Theater Row.

Armchair travels

Two ways to experience non-American culture this weekend: The culturally correct one…and the other one.

On Saturday, I trekked to the Japan Society to see Yubiwa Hotel's Candies: Girlish Hardcore. It's hard to define—a bit of performance, a bit of dance, a bit of theater—but it also didn't really add up to the sum of its parts. Considering that the Japanese have pushed the boundaries of both hardcore (in its sexual, visual and musical expressions) and girlishness (through kawaii imagery and its constant evolution, for instance), the show, created and directed by Shirotama Hitsujiya, was oddly flaccid. I don't mind a lack of narrative backbone at all, but you have to compensate with arresting visuals. A couple of them did rise to the top: A crouching, naked woman, her back to the audience, excretes batter onto a hot plate; it cooks into a pancake, which is messily eaten by two other women. And in the finale, the five performers slowly stripped to their underwear while smoking and executing a line dance; the scene was made slightly spooky by the repetitiveness of the movements.

Sunday evening was a completely different experience with stand-up comedian Gad Elmaleh making his NYC debut at the Beacon Theater. Elmaleh, who was born in Morocco, is hugely popular in France, and the Beacon was packed to the rafters with a red-hot crowd on the verge of hysteria. The show went on for almost two and a half hours and Elmaleh was feted like a rock star, complete with requests for skits, people shouting out lines the way some sing along at rock shows, and cries of "You're the man of my life!" The highlights for me were his take on French R&B singing and French musical theater, but really you can never go wrong with physical comedy (Elmaleh is incredibly agile) and Twingo jokes. Bummed he didn't do the ski skit but fortunately Youtube has it, along with Elmaleh and Jamel Debbouze's fab parody of raï superstars Faudel and Chem Mami.

Much of the non-English-speaking art we see in NYC comes to us through semi-official channels—the French Alliance, say, or Scandinavia House or the Goethe Institute or the Japan Society. Or we get our high-brow offerings from BAM or Lincoln Center, whose producers scout international festivals around the world. All good stuff, sure, and the audiences usually bring together Americans and citizens of whatever country is represented; everybody is on their best behavior—Americans because they don't want to look culturally xenophobic, and "the others" because they feel the piece they're watching somehow turns into an ambassador of their home culture.

But there's something to be said for being at a show with your peeps (as you can tell from the success of the Blue Collar Comedy Tour), especially when you live abroad and a mainstream star from back home is visiting. To start with, the crowd coheres in a completely different manner. This happened when I went to see Hong Kong Repertory Theatre's Love in a Fallen City a few months ago. The play was really entertaining, but I can't possibly have enjoyed it as much as the Chinese audience—and that's okay, not everything has to please everybody. This kind of show also plays out as a benign version of homesickness-curing nationalism, the kind it's easy to get behind because nobody gets hurt. At the Beacon it was totally satisfying to laugh at a Twingo joke and not have to explain what a Twingo is, and I felt super-French in a way I hadn't experience since, I don't know, that weasel cover of the New York Post.

Two red aunts on the loose

Despite being bone-tired on Friday night, I dragged myself to Magnetic Field, on Atlantic Avenue, to see Two Tears, a band that had come to my attention only last week. I had noticed the name on the Magnetic Field website as I was looking up their band schedule for the Atlantic Antic fair on Sunday (MagField is a great rock bar, staffed by the nicest people on earth, or at least in Brooklyn; please drop by for a drink and a song). For some reason the name Two Tears caught my eye and I looked it up, only to discover it involved Kerri Davis, who used to play guitar and sing in the Red Aunts. Suddenly it became imperative I see them.

I wrote fairly regularly about L.A.'s Red Aunts in the ’90s (these pieces aren't online, except for this old Time Out review), and nearly a decade after they split, they remain one of my favorite bands from that time. Unlike quite a few faves from back then that now make me cringe (most of the K stuff), the Red Aunts' albums endure as masterpieces of anarchic scuzz . They barely made it to the 30-minute mark (the back of my favorite, 1995's #1 Chicken, boasts "14 songs 23 minutes") and the accompanying live shows were incendiary. A lot of dude-type critics derided the Red Aunts for the fact they couldn't play—which is true, they were barely adequate instrumentalists—but technique was never the point with them, and even as they improved, they still showed no interest in writing complete songs. They didn't seem to capture the girl imagination the way the riot grrl bands did, either, perhaps because the Red Aunts didn't have a message, they were more like nihilistic juvenile delinquents screaming themselves hoarse about how they could kick your ass and not even give two shits about it.

The MP3s on the Two Tears website are more in a garage vein and less screechy, though Davis's tunes continue to be under two minutes with no discernable structure. Live, I was delighted to see that…could it be? YESSSS! The bassist was another Aunt, Debi Martini—aka EZ Wider, aka Connie Champagne, aka Debi Dip—now with longer hair but the same stance, impossibly cool with her back half to the audience. She and Davis even still wrote the set list on their forearms in black Sharpie, the way they did in the Red Aunts. The set was short and rocking, it could not have been a finer Friday-evening show. Alas, it looks as if it's going to be the last Two Tears gig for a while, as EZ Wider informed me afterwards that Davis is moving to Dubai.

The other two bands on the bill were a lot of fun as well, even if I didn't have the same sentimental connection. Locals Imaginary Icons and Michigan's MHz share a member and a taste for arty, sharp garage-punkitude, similar to early Pere Ubu. MHz's guitarist-singer Andy Claydon also runs Flying Bomb Records and was kind enough to hand me a label comp CD and a single by old Michigan faves Bantam Rooster. Loot!

Thursday-night brutality: Celtic Frost & 1349

It was an awesome one-two punch of an evening at B.B. King's yesterday. I had just swallowed the last bite of my pretzel and stepped into the club when the second opening act, 1349 (pictured) got on stage, at the unmetallic hour of 8pm and with all the house lights blazing. (I can't even fathom when first opener Sahg went on. Tea time?) What a sight: They were all in corpsepaint and half of them wore huge spikes on their wristbands. And what a great show! It's not a diss to say that 1349—named after the year the black plague hit Norway—plays textbook black metal. The Norwegian band takes the genre's basic elements (speed, growls, buzzy guitars), throws them into a caldron of bile and spits them out in three-minutes orbs of blackened hatred. No keyboards, no epic suites about Azazel or the distant moons of Pluto—just savage focus and grim, charismatic grandeur (1349 superbly ignored an audience member who taunted them in a parodic high-pitched screech).

The best part is that because the gear of headliner Celtic Frost was already on stage, 1349's drummer was sitting upfront and we could all watch in awe as he carpetbombed the club with double-bass action while his hands flew so fast that his sticks were a blur. While the legendary Frost is 1349's regular drummer, this dude didn't look like him—which I could tell not because I recognized his corpsepaint pattern let alone his face, but because his hair was suspiciously American-curly, not Scandi-straight. (This kind of detail is extremely important in metal, in which men keep their hair long and silky, perhaps in order to better execute hair windmills.) That human beatkeeping machine turned out to be one Tony Laureano, who's spent some time in Nile and Dimmu Borgir—I had in fact seen him play with Dimmu at Ozzfest a few years ago, but he hadn't made quite the same vivid impression as he did yesterday.

After Emperor back in July, Celtic Frost confirmed that 2006 will be remember as a very good year for live extreme metal. The quartet came on a little after 9pm. As vocalist Tom Gabriel Fischer (a.k.a. Tom G Warrior, and one of the best rock vocalists around) put it when he introduced the beginning of the band's US tour in his blog, "Finally we will be able again to convey the dusk of our musical processions to the masses that have been deprived of sufficient morbidity for so long. They shall never forget."

That is an understatement. Boris et al. can just go back to their training wheels: The Swiss vets know heavy. Steve Smith put it best (by way of Strapping Young Lad), describing the band's incredible reunion album, Monotheist, as heavy as a really fucking heavy thing. And live, it really was super-duper double-skull-penetration heavy.

They started on the dirgey side with "Procreation (Of the Wicked)," from Morbid Tales, but then picked up the pace and delivered a half hour that was as perfect a balance of doomy and thrashy as anything I've ever heard. They then returned to the slower mode, and never were less than majestic. When Fischer roared "Oh God, why have you forsaken me?" during the mammoth "Ground," my mind flashed with visions of Hannibal crossing the Alps, hammers of the gods pounding away—a whole array of visuals that seems to have been conjured up from my role-playing days. (It was in college and we played the arcane Chivalry and Sorcery, not the mundane D&D, thank you very much.) The set ended with Monotheist's "Synagoga Satanae," a track which had not particularly caught my ear on record but was a filthy slow burn live. No encore, and they left to the tune of Frank Zappa's "The Torture Never Stops" on the PA. Nice touch.

In non-metal news, the six finalists of the Man Booker Prize have been announced, and I realized I've actually read two of them. The Night Watch isn't Sarah Waters' best novel by far; its backward structure (from 1947 to 1944 to 1941) means that Waters has to contort herself in order to avoid revealing in the first part things that need to be surprises in the last. But the description of London during and right after WWII is very compelling, and the period details anchor the story without ever drawing attention to the painstaking research that no doubt went into gathering them. The second finalist I read is Kate Grenville's The Secret River, which follows a Thames bargeman and his family as they are forcibly moved to Australia in 1806, and they settle by the Hawkesbury River—where they dislodge the local aborigines. The consequences are dramatic, as you might expect, but Grenville's lush prose makes the book both realistic (the early bits about the life of a bargeman are pretty great) and magical. And just when you think it's all going to end in tears, Grenville pulls back slighly in a bittersweet way.

Nathalie Baye, Bruce Wagner, Miranda July

Two more short pieces in Time Out New York:

• an interview with Nathalie Baye, an actress I like a lot more now than in her ’80s prime. She currently stars in Xavier Beauvois' excellent Le Petit lieutenant, and proved to be a smart, articulate interview subject.

• a quick review of Bruce Wagner's Memorial. I'm a bit surprised by the rash of reviews that say that Wagner has mellowed out, that he likes his characters more and that his tone isn't as misanthropic as it used to be. This misreading is based on the fact that Memorial isn't a Hollywood-industry novel. Most Hollywood novels are assumed to be cynical, even though they usually aren't; since Wagner directed his spotlight somewhere else, critics interpreted the change of focus as corresponding to some sort of renewed faith in humanity. Wrong! Most of the characters aren't obnoxious, true—they are weak, deceiving, pathetic. Wagner puts the elderly Marjorie through a 2006 SoCal version of the stations of the cross, which escalates until the old woman loses everything (including, most humiliatingly, control over her bowels). Marjorie's son is a location scout who develops an addiction to painkillers after being punked by a so-called friend. Her daughter is an architect who can't seem to get anything built and ends up getting impregnated by the tycoon whose memorial job she'd been courting. Through it all, Wagner's command of language sends me in an envy-fueled funk. What I wouldn't give to be able to be able to come up with his chapter on Zaha Hadid!

In other reading news, I was actually able to finish a short story in The New Yorker. After music, video, performance art and film, Miranda July has turned to fiction. Set in—where else?—Portland, Oregon, her effort, "Something That Needs Nothing," reads like an anomie-laden version of something from an early-’90s riot grrrl zine crossed with an Adrian Tomine comic; it's greatly effective because July knows teenage girls' hearts.

Ave Caesar

For some unfathomable reason (sinking Empire? Class-divided society in which the rich lose themselves in McVillas and futile pursuits?), I rented Caligula, the 1979 epic attributed to spaghettisploitation master Tinto Brass (based on a script by Gore Vidal) and re-edited by Penthouse overlord Bob Guccione. Uncoincidentally perhaps, a Caligula voiceover claims "I am all men as I am no man and so…I am a God" while at the exact same time the name "Bob Guccione" appears in the credits and Prokofiev's "Dance of the Knights," from Romeo and Juliet, swells in the background. Since this follows an opening scene of Caligula frolicking incestuously with his sister, Drusilla, the overall effect actually is awe-inducing in its baroque nuttiness and sense of an ego run amok.

And it's hard to get nuttier or run more amok than this artifact of the late 1970s, a time when you could do a movie loaded with sexual and moral perversity on a big budget and with actors such as John Gielgud, Peter O'Toole, Malcolm McDowell and Helen Mirren (pictured above, but in another Caligula project; read on). We'll never know what the film would be like had Brass made it the way he wanted, but after Guccione took control of the editing room, the result was a sometimes fascinating, sometimes revolting, sometimes boring mix of narrative confusion, visual looniness, jumbled political message and hardcore-sex inserts. Aesthetically, Caligula is equal parts Fellini bacchanalia (art director Danilo Donati seems to have recycled quite a few frocks and wigs from his own work on that director's Satyricon), Studio 54 disco and Harkonnen planet Giedi Prime as shown in David Lynch's Dune.

Some of the best scenes are at the beginning, when Peter O'Toole's Tiberius—his too-small black wig half-covering his head, open sores festering on his ravaged face—shows McDowell's Caligula how to entertain himself and spits out lines such as "Serve the state, Caligula, although the people in it are wicked beasts," while in the background conjoined twins have sex with drugged-looking courtesans. Shortly thereafter, John Gielgud's character kills himself, no doubt because by then Gielgud had realized what he'd signed up for.

It would be great to be able to say that Caligula is a violent political masterpiece that now offers us a distorted mirror of the Bush administration's down spiral into ineffectual decadence and fraught Empire-building, but alas that is not the case. Rather, it is a fascinating bit of film history, testifying to a time when it felt as if the graphic representation of realistic sex was becoming an option in the mainstream. With the recent release of similarly frank—in their depiction of sex, not their cruelty—flicks by the likes of Catherine Breillat (Romance, Anatomy of Sex), Michael Winterbottom (9 Songs), Vincent Gallo (The Brown Bunny) and, soon, John Cameron Mitchell (Short Bus), maybe we're trying to catch up to the ’70s.

In any case, I'm not the only one with Caligula on her mind: Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli had a short titled "Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula" (featuring Helen Mirren, back for seconds and pictured in this post's photo, along with Vidal and, er, Karen Black) in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

A worthy addition to the roll

A quick post to welcome my esteemed colleague David Cote, Time Out New York's theater editor, to the wonderful world of blogging. He can be found at Histriomastix. Check out what he has to say about the NYC stage—which is in great need of the kind of non-sycophantic observations David is sure to supply.

Studio 60 vs. 30 Rock

I've been intrigued by two upcoming NBC series, the Aaron Sorkin drama Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and Tina Fey's sitcom 30 Rock, both of which start with an identical premise: the backstage shenanigans at a Saturday Night Live–like show. So I managed to get my mitts on screeners of the pilots and proceeded to spend some quality time in front of the tube.

Let's get one thing out of the way: Tina Fey is one of the most overrated people in television. During her reign as head writer on SNL, she brought the show right back to the dark days of the 1980s. She's not half as sharp as she thinks she is, as illustrated by the half-baked Mean Girls (Heathers is vastly superior on all counts). Now it looks as if 30 Rock (which starts in October) will bring the day of reckoning. Granted, what I saw is not what's going to air, since it was reshot with Jane Krakowski replacing Rachel Dratch as the star of The Girlie Show, the show within 30 Rock.You can howl til you're blue in the face about how the network traded idiosyncratic indie-type Dratch for a more beautiful woman, but Dratch was woefully out of her depth and Krakowski actually is a versatile comedienne. Fey is another matter: She gave herself a prominent role in the series, in addition to writing it, and her limitations are already showing. It's highly unlikely she has what it takes to write a satire of the kind of show she herself used to do, so 30 Rock is probably going to turn into a benign workplace comedy similar to Newsradio. We're two months away from Thanksgiving but the turkey's already landed.

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip also suffers from dead weight at the middle, namely the wooden Matthew Perry and the wet blanket known as Amanda Peet. The latter is meant to play a wunderkind network prez but alas she emits all the steely charisma of frozen haddock, and in some weirdly lit scenes her prominent, blindingly white central incisors kept reminding me of Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's Nosferatu.

That said, the episode I saw is well written and oddly gripping, especially Judd Hirsch's impassioned hijacking of a live broadcast—followed by reviews calling it a Network-like incident, a comparison you should expect to see in every actual write-up of the show as Sorkin cleverly feeds critics the image of himself as a modern-day Paddy Chayefsky. Sarah Paulson, aka Mrs Cherry Jones, is promiding in the part—apparently inspired by Kristin Chenoweth—of a Christian with decent social views. I don't have any pre-conceived opinion about Sorkin, having successfully managed to never see more than two minutes of The West Wing, but Studio 60 (starting mid-September) shows a bit of promise, especially if it explores base compromises in network television and the inanity of live sketch comedy. But considering that abortion still isn't an option on American television, I doubt Studio 60 will have genuine fangs (unlike Amanda Peet), limiting itself to the usual biteless bark about the media blah blah blah.

A quick one while she's away

Since I've been too busy—oh all right, I was driving around upstate New York, looking for the finest donuts in the lake region—to post, here are links to a few bits and bobs I wrote for Time Out New York: reviews of Louise Welsh's Scottish noir Bullet Trick and Girl Talk's mash-up CD Night Ripper, as well as a profile of the lovely Nina Hellman, one of the brightest lights of downtown theater.

The calm before the storm

Visiting non-English-speaking family and, frankly, not that much going on have combined to ensure limited outings in the past few days. Things will pick up soon though: I've just realized with no little trepidation that the two weeks following September 9 are booked solid already. I guess that's what Emergen-C was invented for.

I'll use my last shreds of free time to finish James Lee Burke's latest Dave Robicheaux novel, Pegasus Descending. I discovered Burke on a trip to Louisiana about three years ago, and was immediately taken with his Cajun spin in American noir. Burke's plots are better than usual (and he doesn't glamorize Robicheaux, an alcoholic cop with a penchant for bursts of destructive rage) but I especially love his relentless attacks on Louisiana's corruption and its crushing poverty. The latter is what I remember most from driving through the state's backwood parishes. America can flex its muscles all it wants, but cruise half a day on roads littered with abandoned rusty appliances and punctuated by pitiful casinos and drive-by daiquiri shacks, and I guarantee you'll drop into a funk rather different from the one advertised in the va-va-voom French Quarter (which I actually found rather depressing, full as it was of fratboys drinking vats of beer at 11am).

Burke is to Louisiana what Carl Hiaasen is to Florida. Both use the crime-lit framework to ram into their respective state's foibles, though Hiaasen opts for a lighter, farcical approach, while Burke is downright Greek in his perception of Louisiana. The state he describes is mired in the 19th century, paralyzed by antediluvian class and race structures. Forget about Jay McInerney: If Burke wrote "literary" novels about New York society, he'd be ranked as one of our era's most biting, clear-eyed chroniclers. But he writes about a middle-aged cop in Iberia Parish, so he doesn't get full-page reviews in opinion-defining newspapers. That's okay: Readers with an inquisitive mind know where to find him.

Book roundup

Sheesh, what a lame post title.

In the past few weeks I've managed to polish off some in-the-news literary-ish novels—Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children, Jennifer Egan's The Keep (#17 on the Times' best-seller list as I type) and Bruce Wagner's Memorial—in addition to my usual subway diet of translated noirs.

Wagner's book I'm reviewing for Time Out, so more on it later. The Emperor's Children isn't great, but quite good. Messud captures a certain kind of ego-laden not-quite-young-anymore Manhattanites, as well as a self-absorbed star pundit always ready to shoot off about the heavy topics of the day. More intriguing than the plot, however, is why the book isn't great. Danielle's affair with her best friend's father reads obvious; Bootie comes across as paint-by-number plot device, not actual character. And everything is so goddam tidy! Messud can do drama but not tragedy. Actually, I'm not even sure she can do drama—what she's good at is dramedy. She's excellent at capturing details and specific, self-contained scenes (like the outré one in which Julius is caught cheating by his boyfriend) but the overall picture lacks heft and urgency.

The Keep is what happens when a literary writer does genre. Egan could have written a nicely packaged gothic suspense (and the passing allusion, conscious or not, to The Prisoner, is pretty cool) but she took it one step further by making it a book about writing, confinement real and metaphorical, and imagination, as it quickly appears that the story about Danny coming into a mysterious central European castle actually is a writing-class project by a prison inmate, and whether the tale has real-life roots is left ambiguous until the very end. The Keep looks more lightweight than The Emperor's Children at first, but in its own way it's as much of an achievement. You could also say that both books are written by skillful authors full of self-awareness about what they're doing. Both at times read like MFA honors' program projects in that they feel…deliberate.

As for the subway books (as in, the ones I read on my daily commute), Tonino Benacquista's Tout à l'ego collects short stories from the 1990s, but is far from prime Benacquista—I prefer his novels as his stories rely too much on a last-page black-humored twist (a tactic very reminiscent of Fredric Brown, a cultish author who seems better remembered in France than in the US these days). Benacquista's last couple of books (Quelqu'un d'autre, Malavita) have brought diminishing artistic returns just as his popularity has soared. He may never top early noirs such as La Maldonne des sleepings and La Commédia des ratés, but at least his screenwriting collaborations with director Jacques Audiard (Read My Lips and The Beat That My Heart Skipped) have contributed to the rejuvenation of French film noir

Arnaldur Indridason's Reykjavik-set Silence of the Grave is one of the bleakest, most depressing procedurals I've ever read. The background is domestic violence, and Indridason is so good at mood that you almost forget the holes in the plot.

Finally, Henning Mankell's The Man Who Smiled, which actually was written in 1994 but is just being put out by the Free Press. Inspector Kurt Wallander starts off deep in a depressive funk, matched by totally gloomy weather: Now that's what I call top Scandi noir! Unfortunately, reading this book also reminded me of how mediocre the newer Mankell offerings have been in comparison to his older stuff—in the recent Before the Frost, the Swedish master managed to turn Wallander's daughter Linda into one of the most annoying fictional characters in recent memory. If he has any sense at all, he'll have her killed in the line of fire in the next installment.

"My rock bottom is still your wildest dreams"

Or so brags Martin Short in his Broadway show, Martin Short: Fame Becomes Me.

Ah, funnymen… I've always had a fondness for ’60s-style vaudeville, and Fame Becomes Me delivers a healthy dose of it. The show is good-natured fluff but entertaining, especially in the Jiminy Glick segment, when Short "interviews" a guest picked from the audience. Nathan Lane "happened" to be there when the Times' Ben Brantley came to see the show; my esteemed colleague Adam Feldman got Cynthia Nixon; we were treated to the Crying Comedian himself—Rip Taylor. The next few weeks are going to be rough.

But Taylor's cameo actually resulted in five minutes of show-biz magic because suddenly the evening, which had been ambling along nicely, turned lunatically surreal. First, Taylor readjusted his toupee (with highlights, mind you) as he was ushered on. Then Short/Jiminy Glick proceeded to unleash a barrage of passive-aggressive jokes, playing off, for instance, Taylor's bling ring. When Taylor was led back out, looking completely dazed and barely coherent as he tottered in his Mephistos, I was in comedy heaven.

Other than that, the show delivers a series of brief, reasonably fun songs written by Marc Shaiman (who's also on stage) and Scott Wittman (who directed). Several of them spoof classic musical moments: "Step Brother de Jesus" is a take on Godspell/Hair-type hippie musicals; "The Lights Have Dimmed on Broadway" underscores how Wicked's washed-out pop style is a haven for showoffy singers; the staging of "Three Gorgeous Kids" rips off…sorry, is a tribute to the "Triplets" number from Vincente Minnelli's The Band Wagon. And Sondheim gets a couple of nods: "Married to Marty" mimics "Getting Married Today" from Company, and the master gets namechecked for not writing black characters in "Stop the Show."

That dig feels rather rich, however, considering the song in question is typical of Shaiman and Wittman's knack for having it both ways, which I think prevents them from graduating from good songwriters to great ones. (That and the fact that Shaiman is a better composer than Wittman is a lyricist.) Powerhouse singer Capathia Jenkins is made to both deride the habit musicals have of inserting a "big black lady" who stops the show with a belt at the eleventh hour and embody that very trend. This is pretty cheeky of Shaiman and Wittman, considering that she's the only one in the supporting cast who doesn't participate in the previous ensemble songs. She's in the opening number, then is off stage for almost an hour before coming back as a nurse looking after the supposedly comatose Short, then as, well, the belting big black lady. Was she gone for an hour because she didn't, you know, fit? Sorry, doesn't fly: Parts of the show are obviously tailored to the supporting cast's various strengths—Nicole Parker gets to do the impersonations of Ellen DeGeneres, Celine Dion and Britney Spears she's perfected on MADtv for instance. And Shaiman and Wittman couldn't give Jenkins more to do? Weird.

Welcome wagon

I feel lucky to live in a town where I can see Meryl Streep on stage. Not only that, but in a version of Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children adapted by Tony Kushner and directed by George C. Wolfe, with new music by Jeanine Tesori (the team behind the wonderful Caroline, or Change). The Sheila and I were lucky to have seats in the fourth row, center, so we got to see La Streep in action from real close. Watching her was like watching a virtuoso musician in full control of her instrument.

I used to be completely obsessed with Streep at the beginning of her film career: The Seduction of Joe Tynan, with Alan Alda; Manhattan, of course; another strong-willed woman depicted as selfish and manipulative in Kramer vs. Kramer; and above all The Deer Hunter and The French Lieutenant Woman. My infatuation ended with Sophie's Choice: Streep wasn't acting anymore, she was acting—all tics (check out how she uses the sideway glance to indicate pretty much anything) and affectations. It was downhill from there: Out of Africa, Ironweed and A Cry in the Dark, the latter marking the beginning of the Accent Years.

A trilogy of sorts in which Streep fully unleashed her hitherto disguised comic chops stood out: She-Devil, Postcards from the Edge and Death Becomes Her (the 1980s version of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane). Alas, the reinvention they seemed to augur didn't take, and Streep spent the 1990s playing the ideal suffering mom—especially when fighting back (The River Wild)—and hiding behind spot-on accents (The Bridges of Madison County, Dancing at Lughnasa). It was as if part of her wanted to be the ideal Yankee mom, and another part negated her blond all-American-ness. By then, I had given up on her.

It took Charlie Kaufman to return her to greatness: First in Adaptation, then, in 2005, with his live radio play Hope Leaves the Theater, in which Streep gleefully skewered her own image as a grande dame of the stage. A few months later, she brought the house down at the Public Theater's 50th-anniversary celebration when she sang "Sodomy" from Hair.

This production of Mother Courage has a lot going for it, even when Wolfe's staging feels muddled, even when Kushner gets carried away and keeps padding the original text so that the show lasts over three hours. But what really makes it is Streep: She's on stage the entire time and you can't take your eyes away from her. Who else could have done this role at this point? Stockard Channing maybe. Why not Patti LuPone? Any suggestions, dear readers?

Kiki and Herb: Mixed up on Broadway

Weirdly mixed feelings about Kiki and Herb's new Broadway show. Or should I say "new"? Fans of the dynamic duo (played by Justin Bond and Kenny Mellman) will be familiar with a fairly large portion of Kiki and Herb: Alive on Broadway, which isn't necessarily a good thing. Part of K&H's appeal derives from familiarity with their backstory. Back in the downtown days, it would be randomly revealed over the course of various performances: One night you'd get a story about the tragic death of Kiki's daughter, Coco; another you'd learn about about why Kiki's other daughter, Miss D, had to be placed with social services; on yet another, there may be some long-winded reminiscence about cavorting with celebrities in Swinging London, or about one of the duo's half-forgotten, misguided albums. The K&H shows were about the balance between CC and ginger–fueled trips down memory lane (emphasis on trips) and the disheveled, hysterical performance of pop and rock nuggets, some of them stretched to absurd lengths and interspersed with flotsam and jetsam popping to the surface of Kiki's brain with Tourette's-like randomness. At one point I was so obsessed with Kiki and Herb that I went to see them almost every week.

For their Broadway debut, K&H blend new selections (Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy," Scissor Sisters' "Take Your Mama") with some of their tried-and-true hits ("Total Eclipse of the Heart," introduced as part of the Broadway songbook, which is technically true since it was in Jim Steinman's dreadful Dance of the Vampires; Daniel Johnston's "Walking the Cow," as usual paired with the anecdote about Kiki's cow Daisy eating Jesus' afterbirth). The banter similarly incorporates familiar anecdotes (Kiki meeting Herb for the first time) and new material, including a heavy-handed pro-gay-marriage paean in the second act that doesn't feel very Kiki at all.

And my question here is: Why not a brand-new show? If you're going to be on Broadway, why not expand the K&H experience? After all, the kind of washed-up cabaret duo created by Bond and Mellman would have jumped on the opportunity to go overboard, to hire some dancing boys and girls and jump headfirst into Great White Way vulgarity. I guess the rationale is to expose newcomers to the duo's world (it worked for Ben Brantley), but the end result feels frustratingly on the fence. The show is too outré for a run-of-the-mill Broadway audience, but not enough for its natural constituency. And because of the very nature of Kiki and Herb's act—which to me was among the most innovative of the past decade—I'm not sure that problem can be solved.

Gothic noir

Vacationing at my parents' a couple of summers ago, I stumbled upon the last few minutes of a very strange 1940s movie late one night. I couldn't identify the title, but the film seemed to involve a group of urbane devil-worshippers and a mysterious woman in perfectly even black bangs. Reading about producer Val Lewton (of Cat People fame) recently, I realized the odd movie I'd caught was called The Seventh Victim (1943) and Lewton, rather than director Mark Robson, was considered its author. (You can read the screenplays of Lewton's major movies here.) Finally watching the movie in its entirety over the weekend revealed it to be a melancholy, chiaroscuro tone poem—tellingly, it opens with an epigraph from a John Donne sonnet: "I runne to death and death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterday."

Kim Hunter, in her screen debut, plays Mary, a young woman who leaves her boarding school (and its lesbianish headmistress) to look for her vanished sister, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks, she of the bangs and once married to director Richard Brooks). If she lived now, Jacqueline would be labeled a depressive and put on Zoloft. But we're in 1943 and her fascination with death (she often retires to a room empty except for a chair and a hangman's noose) leads her to join the Palladists, a sect of devil-worshippers so well-heeled, you expect them to hold their coven meetings at the Algonquin. But we only discover this progressively, mostly through clues left by the men who gravitate around the yin-yang sisterly planets: a ratty, doomed private detective; Jacqueline's husband (who explains to Mary that her sister "had a feeling about life—that it wasn't worth living unless one could end it"); a failed, inquiring poet; and a psychiatrist whose unctuous charm is both charming and menacing. The movie weaves a very odd spell, stumbling from one scene to another, its narrative driven not by logic but by a phantasmagorical aesthetic.

This is typical of Lewton, who usually turned his lack of budget into an advantage, replacing A-list stars and grand sets or effects with idiosyncratic performers directed to underact (Kim Hunter looks as if she's sleepwalking throughout, as if she had stepped into a dream in order to find her lost sister) and dramatic lighting and camera angles. In this respect, The Seventh Victim is exemplary, a catalogue of a man's obsessions.

Cirque du Sexy

Burlesque doesn't really rock my boat, and that genre's revival in the 2000s has largely left me cold. But mix it up with vaudeville and plain old circus acts, and suddenly it's a whole different kettle of hoopla. Absinthe, a show currently running at the Spiegeltent parked by Southstreet Seaport, is a real hoot because it's so obviously derived from the late 19th/early 20th century vaudeville shows in which sopranos belting out arias coexisted with men who ran around and hit each other on the head with frying pans—Buster Keaton, among others, learned his trade on that circuit.

The acts are real short in Absinthe, and the audience sits real close, sometimes uncomfortably so. From that spatial and temporal brevity springs an engaging spectacle in which genuine physical feats come in very sexy wrapping. Fans of new circus (or is that New Circus?) will be familiar with the approach, but when well done—and it is very well done in Absinthe—it bears watching again and again. (Though Camille O'Sullivan may want to reconsider covering "Falling in Love Again" in its original German; her pronunciation is iffy.)

Highlight for me was Ursula Martinez's striptease-cum-prestidigitation number, which brought the audience to its feet, hooting. I hear that Martinez is likely to be back next year as part of the Duckie show P.S 122 is bringing from London. But it's her solo pieces—which explore the border between public and private, fiction and autobiography, and which she's done in venues such as the Barbican—that I'd love to see most. Let's hope a keen-eyed NYC producer drops by Absinthe.

I'm an Indian too

Until it officially opens, I will refrain from posting at length about the new A.R. Gurney play, Indian Blood, seen tonight at 59E59. A quick comment, though: Rebecca Luker is in it (and no, it's not a musical), and she looks uncannily like Catherine O'Hara. She even talks like her. Weird.

Another recent viewing, on DVD this time: John Huston's 1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. Great scene at the beginning, when a Mexican kid (played by Robert Blake!) tries to get Humphrey Bogart to buy a lottery ticket. Bogart keeps waving him away, the kids keeps insisting, so Bogey throws a glass of water at him. Ah, the days when movies showed people casually being mean to kids (as opposed to showing more severe child abuse, which is relatively frequent on screen now and becomes the point of the story, rather than a visual detail meant to delineate a character) and smoking… Of course, the brief scene is meant to foreshadow the revelation that Bogart's character is a little, how shall I put it?—unstable. Still…

The movie also confirms that I much prefer Bogart as a bad guy; another favorite performance by him is as a nasty, violent screenwriter in Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place, made two years after Sierra Madre. The novel upon which that film is based, by Dorothy Hughes, is quite different but still worth picking up, especially since it was reissued by the Feminist Press three years ago. (I actually did an article about the Feminist Press' pulp reissues, including Hughes' book, at the time.)

Musical à deux

The latest New Group production, Everythings Turning Beautiful, is an interestingly flawed musical—or is it a play with music? In any case, it deserved better than the snottily dismissive, largely padded review Ben Brantley delivered in the Times, if only because it at least attempts to integrate the songs in an organic way. It's true that Seth Zvi Rosenfeld's characters sometimes have to deliver purplish prose, but the musical interludes flow out naturally because Daphne Rubin-Vega and Malik Yoba play songwriters obsessed both with their crafts and their collaboration with each other; it feels completely right that they would perform for each other all the time. In addition, singing allows them to avoid actually talking about what's really on their mind. (Oink-oink moment: The leads both look great in their underwear.)

While Rubin-Vega's voice is rather frayed at this point (a scary prospect since she's slated to play Fantine in the upcoming revival of Les Miz), Yoba's is soulful in a restrained way, and he's a stage natural. Perhaps the Public should look in his direction next time it wants to put on an interesting Shakespeare.

Pop thoughts

After getting irrationally excited that Latoya (Jackson) not only had a new album out but had managed to get it to no. 1, I was slightly disappointed upon learning that it actually was LeToya (Luckett) who had a smash on her hands. Still, it's pretty fun to see someone kicked out of Destiny's Child after two albums make it to the top by out-Beyoncéing Beyoncé. While the sight of yet another CD relying on generous servings of soul classics (Love Unlimited on "U Got What You Need," the Stylistics on "Torn," the Spinners on "She Don't") is maddening, LeToya actually pulls the mix of R&B and hip-hop better than most—indie rockers should listen to the production on "Tear Da Club Up" and weep.

Speaking of production, John Tofu pointed out to me that there's no bass on Fergie's current single, "London Bridge"—ballsy!

And Ciara finally has a song worthy of "1, 2"; it's the exquisitely elastic "Get Up" and it's lurking on the Step Up soundtrack.

Is it me or is the summer of 2006 one of the best in recent memory when it comes to hit songs? Between Rihanna's "SOS," Nelly Furtado's "Promiscuous," Christina Aguilera's "Ain't No Other Man," Shakira's "Hips Don't Lie," Fergie's "London Bridge" and half a dozen others I'm forgetting, we're pretty spoiled.

Split personalities

In today's New York Times, Janet Maslin reviews Julie Phillips' James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon. Tiptree was one of the authors I discovered when as a teen I started plowing through my father's numerous issues of Galaxie, a French science-fiction magazine, and his collection of hardcover books published in the early 1970s by Opta/Club du livre d'anticipation. (French sci-fi geeks will nod in nostalgic recognition.) Of course at the time I had no idea that Tiptree was a woman. While the gender-bending aspect of the Sheldon/Tiptree story is obviously crucial, especially since, according to Maslin, Phillips suggests Sheldon was a lesbian, I find the general idea of building a new identity—any new identity—as a writer equally compelling.

Multiplying identities according to various projects isn't new, as anybody who's tried to find their way through electronic-music releases can attest (Richard James = Aphex Twin = Polygon Window = Power Pill = AFX; Sasu Ripatti = Vladislav Delay = Luomo = Sistol = Uusitalo), but somehow it seems to have a deeper connection for a writer than a musician. A few months ago came out Angie David's biography of Dominique Aury, who was a textbook example of dissimulation and secret coding as both personal and creative covers. (No fan of Judith Butler et al., I'm contorting myself not to use the word masquerade.) While the book is titled Dominique Aury, that name wasn't even the subject's real one. Born Anne Desclos, she switched to Aury relatively quickly, then wrote Story of O under a second alias, Pauline Réage. Aury had a thriving career as an editor in the French postwar publishing world, while Réage wrote one of the most famous erotic novels of the 20th century. It doesn't seem like a total coincidence that Tiptree wrote science fiction and Réage a novel about an SM relationship. Both sci-fi and erotic fiction rely on precise codes, and part of the fun of masquerading (damn!) is to obey a different set of rules than the ones you are meant to follow publicly. Perhaps this is why the nicknames and varying identities of electronic-music guys feel like such a pose: They don't seem to hide deep differences between personal/artistic purposes, only relatively slight variations between projects at best (it's not as if Richard James produces 50 Cent under a false name), whims at worst. See Philip Sherburne's thoughts on the subject of names in electronic music.

And lest I miss the opportunity for a oink-oink moment: Angie David certainly knows how to pose for a publicity photo. The head leaning on the arms…the sweep of the hair…the leather boots…